BFG GeForce 8600 GTS OC Review

Posted at: 12:00am 17th April 2007 by Chris Lee

Price £152.73 Inc VAT
Supplier Overclockers
Manufacturer BFG

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is a tricky game to benchmark, as performance differs radically between indoor and outdoor environments, so we've split it into two tests. At 1,280 x 1,024, without AA and AF, but with maximum detail settings and HDR, the BFG averaged a strong 52fps indoors, although this is virtually identical to a Radeon X1950 Pro. Outdoors, the BFG's average plunged to 27fps; again, this is nearly identical to the score of the Radeon, showing that the differences between these cards aren't enough to overpower Oblivion's outdoor environments. Our final test was Company of Heroes; the BFG averaged 42fps at 1,280 x 1,024 with AA on, which is more than enough to make the game playable.

Attesting to the already-high core speed, we only managed to overclock the 8600 GTS GPU by an additional 25MHz, while the RAM was happy running at an impressive 1.12GHz (2.24GHz effective). This gave us a couple of frames extra per second in F.E.A.R., which was enough to provide a minimum frame rate of 26fps at 1,680 x 1,050, although this is still borderline in terms of actual playability.

Both GeForce 8600 GTS and its baby brother, the 8600 GT, come with PureVideo HD, which means they can accelerate H.264 video, but only the GTS natively supports HDCP.

CONCLUSION
The transition to DirectX 10 was always going to throw up some difficult decisions. On the one hand, you have the bargain DirectX 9-only £110 Radeon X1950 Pro, which is generally a better performer than the 8600 GTS in current games. And on the other hand, you have the 8600 GTS, which has the DirectX 10 trump card up its sleeve. So, is it worth counting the pennies and grabbing an 'old tech' bargain, or is the wiser investment to buy into DX10?

The main problem for the BFG GeForce 8600 GTS is its high price. For only £30 extra, a fully-fledged Palit 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS can be yours, which is quieter and offers significantly more performance, enough to play games comfortably at 1,680 x 1,050, the native resolution of a 20.1 or 22in widescreen TFT. If, on the other hand, you own a smaller screen, the wiser choice now would be to save £40 and opt of the slightly more powerful (in DX9 games at least) Radeon X1950 Pro. By the time DX10 games hit the market, the price of 1st generation DX10 hardware is likely to have fallen, and by then, there may well be more mid-range options to choose from.

* Click here for the full table of benchmark results

IN DETAIL
Graphics processor Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS, 710MHz
Pipeline 32 stream processors (1.45GHz), 8 ROPs
Memory 256MB GDDR3, 2GHz effective
Bandwidth 32GB/sec
PCI-E 16x
Compatibility Direct X 10, OpenGL 2.0
Anti-aliasing 2x, 4x, 8x, 8xQ, 16x, 16xQ
Anisotropic filtering 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x
Connections 2 x DVI, ViVo, SLI